wilderness vision fast vigils

Courtship With The Gods

A Wilderness Vigil Rite Of Passage

The Invitation

Rites of passage are a trans-cultural phenomenon at the heart of most Indigenous and ancestrally intact cultures. The vision fast is a 4-day and 4-night ceremony of solo deep immersion in the wilderness and was practiced in various forms across the Planet for healing, vision-conjuring, and often to ritualize a threshold.

As humans, we are standing on a threshold. Behind us lay the increasing consequence of 6,000+ years of a colonial separation cosmology where the animate powers of life – the many Gods, and the spirits held within each stone, waterfall, hummingbird, and glisten of moonlight on the water, have fallen silent as human beings increased their need to rationalize, explain away, and ultimately attempt to control nature.

But the wild powers of life did not go away.

They now rear back at us with mega forest fires, unprecedented flooding, unparalleled heat waves and mass extinction. The hum of the world melts from birdsong into machine. Many of us exist in a sort of domesticated emotional petrification, cut off from our true power which we were falsely trained to believe resides within us rather than through us, formed by our capacity for relationship with life.

The Earth wants our attention, but the path to once again hear the many voices of her chorus is totally undigestible with our 30-second social media attention spans. And thus we need to slow down, practice, and re-anchor ourselves to the land if we are to enter this Courtship with the Gods—and to receive the visions, messages and melodies they may be holding for us.

In this 3 Month Rite-of-Passage container, we will be doing just that: slowing down, practicing, listening, and re-weaving ourselves into a courtship with the many minute and grand cosmological and earthly forces by whose relationship all true power comes.

We will also be examining what psycho-emotional patterns of feeling, thought and behavior—narratives we perhaps inherited from a time before our own—are in the way of this deep relationship, now outdated and ultimately wanting to be shed through this rite of passage.

For July and August, we will meet once a month in council (2 times total): an ancient practice of deep emergent circle story-sharing. There will be associated tasks and exercises each month, all serving as foundation-building before participants embark, with clear intention, on a 4-day wilderness immersion vision fast.

Many vision fasts being offered do not include any preparation nor integration outside of the time on the land. We believe that for this ceremony to root with deep meaning in one’s life, the proper dedication to preparation and integration are needed. This is not another weekend workshop. We need the time to deepen personally and within the group so that we can step across the threshold with power, when the time comes.

This Rite of Passage is for those wanting to mark a deep shift in their lives towards a slowing down and deep listening—a life rooted in a relational conversation with the Earth and Soul, where from engaging the shadows, their gifts can come forth in service to all life.